A contemporary operating system, such as Microsoft Corporation's Windows® 98 operating system, provides many different ways in its shell user interface to navigate among local and remote (e.g., Internet) content, components, and resources. For example, the user's desktop provides storage for or links to programs, documents, and system resources. A Start button provides navigation to recent documents, system resources, a Favorites list (through which a user may access saved web locations), computer Settings, Programs, Search, Find, and so forth.
The menu items in the start menu and the icons and/or files on the desktop normally represent software resources (e.g., files) available to the computer. During installation of application programs, the application programs may put items on the Start menu, and one or more shortcuts on the desktop. After installing several application programs, both the start menu and desktop often have so many menu items and icons that it prevents the user from efficiently executing common operations.
Further, Microsoft Corporation's Windows Explorer offers a view of files on a computer. However, to a beginning or intermediate user, the number of files shown may be overwhelming, and the location of particular files may not be logical, making finding a particular file difficult.
Another example of information that is sometimes hard to find on a computer is saved web locations. A link to a web location (hereinafter “web links”) may be saved in a number of places in the computer, such as in a “Favorites” list or on the desktop, for example. Another user interface that provides access to web content is a web portal. A portal (e.g., www.msn.com) is a website that aims to be a “doorway” to the World-Wide Web, typically offering a search engine and/or links to useful web pages, and possibly news or other services. These services are usually provided for free in the hope that users will make the site their default home page, or at least visit it often, whereby the service may profit by selling advertising.
Although each of these user interfaces provides a method for accessing local and/or remote content, beginning and intermediate computer users are often confused about where to go to find programs and documents on a computer. Even if a user locates a program, the user may not known whether to look locally or remotely for particular content. Thus, current organization and presentation to local and remote programs, documents, system resources and content on a computer is confusing to many users.